The morning did not break; it hemorrhaged.
Kaelen watched from his crevice in the granite outcrop as the sky shifted from the absolute black of a starless void to the bruised, sickly violet of a hematoma. There was no sun. Only a diffuse, suffocating luminescence that seemed to filter through layers of dead skin rather than atmosphere.
He lay still. The Audit ran automatically, a comforting subroutine in a mind threatening to fracture, but the data was gibberish.
Core Temperature: Trending below 36 degrees Celsius. Hypothermia risk: Moderate. Hydration: Deficit. Rib Integrity: Compromised. Location: Unknown.
He rolled onto his side, and the movement sent a spike of white heat through his chest. He gasped, tasting copper.
He looked at his hands. They were caked in a thick, grey sludge that coated everything in this wretched place. It wasn't just dirt. In Sector 7, dirt was dust—dry, abrasive, sterile. This was... wet. It was a slurry of decomposed organic matter, smelling of fermentation and old sugar. It clung to his skin like a parasite.
"Biological inefficiency," he rasped.
He needed water. The math was simple: three days without fluid equaled systemic failure. He was on day one of the Surface, but the crash had dehydrated him. He was already in the red.
He began the descent.
The forest below was a cathedral of madness. As Kaelen moved closer to the tree line, the true horror of the biology became apparent. He had no words for these things. To his eyes, accustomed to rivets and girders, they looked like atrocities.
The "bark" was not wood. It was calcified, grey tissue, spiraled and knotted like scar tissue over a poorly set bone. The leaves were not green; they were a dark, venous purple, pulsing rhythmically as they drank the moisture from the air.
Kaelen stepped onto the ground cover. It didn't crunch. It squelched. It yielded under his boot, oozing a clear, viscous fluid.
Don't look at it, his logic warned. Just walk. Treat it as unstable terrain.
But he had to look. He was an Auditor. You cannot balance the books if you refuse to look at the debt.
He moved through the undergrowth, his knife drawn. The silence of the previous night had evolved. It wasn't quiet anymore. It was whispering. The wind moved through the branches, but it didn't sound like air rushing over surfaces. It sounded like a choir of thousands, exhaling slowly. Hhhhhhhhssssssss...
He found the stream he had heard earlier.
He knelt by the bank. The water was clear, rushing over stones that were perfectly, disturbingly round. He dipped his hand in. It was biting cold, perhaps 4 degrees Celsius.
He hesitated. In the Sector, water was processed. Filtered. Condensed. You knew the chemical composition. Here, this was raw run-off from a dying world.
Probability of contamination: High. Probability of death from dehydration: Absolute.
He drank.
The water hit his stomach like a stone. It tasted of minerals and something else—something sweet and cloying, like flowers left on a grave for too long. It did not quench his thirst so much as coat his throat in a cold film.
He wiped his mouth. He looked at his reflection in the slower-moving eddy of the pool.
The face staring back was gaunt. The eyes were hollow, rimmed with dark circles. They looked feral. He touched his cheek. The skin felt soft, vulnerable. He missed the protection of his heavy coat, now shredded. He missed the barrier of the wagon.
A movement in the reflection broke his focus.
Kaelen spun, the knife flashing out.
Nothing. Just the swaying of the purple ferns.
But something had been there. He felt the gaze. It was a sensation he had never experienced in the machine-world. In the Sector, if a camera watched you, a red light blinked. If a drone watched you, a turbine whirred.
Here, the watching was silent. It was a pressure on the back of the neck.
He stood up, water dripping from his chin. He felt a sudden, violent surge of anger. Not fear. Anger.
He was small. He was broken. He was a man of levers and gears in a world of teeth and claws. He was obsolete.
"I am not a variable to be rounded down," he snarled at the empty woods.
The woods did not answer. They just breathed.
He continued south, following the magnetic pull of the light he had seen the night before. The terrain fought him. Roots—thick as pythons and slick with slime—seemed to shift position when he wasn't looking, tripping him. Thorny vines snagged his clothes, tearing at the fabric.
Midday brought no sun, only a brightening of the grey fog to a headache-inducing white.
He crested a low hill and stopped.
In a clearing below, choked by the encroaching forest, lay a ruin.
It wasn't industrial debris. It was stone. Ancient, white stone, quarried and cut with a precision that predated the Age of Steam. Pillars, fluted and majestic, lay toppled in the mud, broken like the limbs of a giant.
Kaelen approached cautiously. His mind tried to categorize the structure, but he had no reference files.
Material: Marble (Non-Native). Geometry: Non-Standard. Function: Unknown.
He stepped over a fallen archway. He found himself in what looked like a central chamber, open to the sky. And there, standing amidst the rot, were the statues.
They were headless.
Six of them, lined up along the remains of a wall. They wore robes carved from stone that looked as soft as silk. Their hands were held out in gestures that meant nothing to Kaelen. But every single head had been sheared off—not by time, but by force. The breaks were jagged.
And covering the statues, clinging to the stone folds of their robes, was a black, oily substance. It looked like tar, but it shivered even when the wind died down.
Kaelen reached out to touch it, then pulled his hand back. The black dust seemed to absorb the light around it. It felt... absent. Like a hole in the visual field.
He walked to the center of the ruin. There was a slab there. A table of obsidian, polished to a mirror sheen.
On the slab lay a helmet.
Kaelen approached it. It was a bucket helm, rusted and pitted. Inside, there was no skull. Just a nest of dry, grey twigs arranged in a spiral.
And next to the helmet, carved into the obsidian with crude, desperate scratches, were symbols.
He didn't recognize them. They weren't mathematical. They weren't the blocky runes of the engine-priests. They were geometric nightmares. Angles that shouldn't exist. Triangles that seemed to fold inward on themselves. Looking at them made his eyes water.
He touched the table.
Cold.
A chill shot up his arm, bypassing his flesh and striking the bone.
Kaelen looked at the headless statues. He didn't know who they were. He didn't know why they were here. But he understood the silence.
"You aren't sleeping," he whispered to the stone figures. "You're hiding."
A sound behind him. Squelch.
This time, Kaelen didn't spin. He dropped.
He hit the wet earth, rolling to his left, ignoring the scream of his fractured ribs.
Where he had been standing a second ago, a blur of grey motion passed through the air.
Kaelen scrambled up, backing against the obsidian slab.
The creature stood on the broken flagstones.
It was the size of a man, but it walked on four limbs. Its skin was translucent, pale and wet, revealing pulsing red musculature beneath. It had no face—just a smooth, bulbous surface of flesh where a head should be. But on its chest, embedded in the sternum, was a single, wide human eye.
It blinked. The eye swiveled, locking onto Kaelen.
Kaelen's mind reeled. He tried to Audit the threat, but the variables were nonsensical.
Anatomy: Illogical. No cranial unit. Sensory input located in thorax. Weaponry: Bone protrusions. Origin: Unknown.
Kaelen held his knife. It was a rusted piece of steel. Against this... thing... it looked like a toy.
The creature didn't roar. It made a sound like weeping. A soft, pathetic sobbing that emanated from no mouth.
It mimics suffering, Kaelen realized with a jolt of horror. It wants me to hesitate.
The creature lunged.
Kaelen threw himself to the side. The creature's claws—long, bone-white shards—raked across the obsidian slab, sparking.
Kaelen slashed out with his knife. He connected with the creature's flank.
The blade sank in. There was no resistance. It was like cutting through jelly.
The creature shrieked—a high, discordant sound. It whipped around, backhanding Kaelen with a limb that moved like a whip.
The impact sent him flying. He slammed into the base of a headless statue. His vision went white. His ribs felt like they were caving in.
The creature prowled toward him. The eye on its chest widened, the pupil dilating in anticipation.
Kaelen tried to lift the knife. His arm wouldn't listen. It was heavy. Numb.
Audit: Failure. Probability of Survival: 0%.
He looked at the creature. He looked at the weeping eye on its chest.
And something inside Kaelen snapped.
It wasn't a bone. It was the restraint. It was the civilized, logical part of him that believed the universe followed rules. That input equaled output. That force required leverage.
There are no rules here, a cold voice whispered in his mind. There is only meat. And you are meat.
No.
Kaelen forced his hand to move. He didn't try to stand. He didn't try to dodge.
He reached into his pouch.
His hand closed around the cold, heavy lead of the Resonance Core. The heart of the Rime-Weaver he had scavenged from the Sink. He didn't know what it did, not really. He only knew it was the coldest thing in the universe.
He pulled it out. He didn't unwrap the lead. He just held the heavy lump like a stone in his fist.
The creature pounced.
Kaelen didn't brace. He thrust his hand forward, meeting the creature mid-air.
He drove the lead-wrapped core straight into the weeping eye on the creature's chest.
THUD.
The impact was wet. Sickening.
The creature convulsed.
Kaelen didn't know magic. He didn't know why the creature stopped. He only understood thermodynamics. Heat moves to cold. Life is heat. The Core was absolute zero.
The flesh-thing screeched as frost bloomed instantly across its chest. The fluids inside it crystallized. The translucent skin turned grey, then brittle white. The weeping stopped.
Kaelen didn't let go. He roared, a raw, guttural sound that tore his throat. He pushed, driving the frozen weight deeper into the monster, crushing the eye, crushing the sternum.
"Die!" he screamed. "Calculate that!"
The creature flailed, its claws tearing at Kaelen's coat, shredding the fabric, drawing blood from his shoulder.
But the cold was spreading. The monster fell back, heavy and solid. It hit the ground with the sound of a frozen side of beef. It twitched once, then shattered.
Kaelen fell to his knees.
He was panting, gasping for air that wouldn't come. Blood dripped from his shoulder, mixing with the mud.
He looked at the corpse. It wasn't bleeding. It was disintegrating. The ice was melting into a grey sludge that smoked as it touched the ground.
Kaelen looked at the Resonance Core in his hand. The lead pouch was torn. A sliver of the blue crystal inside was visible.
He quickly wrapped it up, shoving it back into his pouch. His fingers were numb with cold burn.
He sat there for a long time, staring at the sludge.
He was alive.
But the math hadn't saved him. Violence had saved him. Brutality had saved him.
He felt a trembling in his hands. Not fear. Adrenaline. And beneath the adrenaline, a hunger.
He touched the wound on his shoulder. It stung. It felt... real.
"I am too weak," he whispered.
In Sector 7, strength was measured in assets. In data.
Here, strength was the ability to put a rock through an eye.
He looked up at the headless statue above him. He looked at the black dust clinging to its robes. He didn't know what the dust was, but he knew it was the opposite of the life teeming in the forest.
He struggled to his feet. He picked up his knife. It was bent. Ruined. Useless.
He looked at the obsidian slab.
He walked over to it. He raised the hilt of his broken knife and brought it down hard on the edge of the black stone.
Crack.
A shard of black glass broke off. It was jagged. Razor sharp.
Kaelen picked it up. He wrapped the base in the leather strip from his belt.
It was crude. It was primitive. It was a weapon of a savage.
It was perfect.
He pulled out the Ledger. The pages were soaked. The ink of his previous life was running, the numbers blurring into nonsense.
He found a dry spot.
Day 17. Status: Adapted. Asset Acquired: Glass Shard. New Variable: The Hunger.
He didn't write a number next to it. He didn't know how to quantify the feeling in his gut. It wasn't the hunger for food. It was the hunger to not be the thing that weeps.
He walked out of the ruin. The grey light was fading into true dark.
But in the distance, cutting through the canopy, the White Spire pulsed.
Flash.
It called to him.
Kaelen began to walk. He moved differently now. He didn't slink. He prowled. The pain in his ribs was still there, but he relegated it to background noise. It was just data.
He was Kaelen of the Sink. Auditor of the Dead.
And he was beginning to understand the currency of Aethelgard.
The currency was blood. And he intended to balance the books.